Politics are perhaps the least discussed set of examples in Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions fail – but some don’t ” which is wholly a paen to the art of prediction and forecasting, perhaps even a love-letter to Bayes’ Law.

Silver’s examples run the gamut from the things that he has expertise in (baseball, gambling, political polling) to those that he doesn’t (climate, weather, seismology, stock markets, chess, public health, terrorism, etcetera).

In all, Silver is able to find the crux of the central issues that challenge successful predictions and illuminate it either through his own exposition or through an interview with an expert.

Because of it’s variety, and because of the way that Silver keeps brining the readers back to the core concepts, it’s an engrossing read. What works best is the interplay between the topics that Silver has first-hand knowledge of and that those that he is approaching more abstractly, more objectively, as they interweave in a way that keeps the reader from drifting away.

Well worth-reading, but if you’re approaching this as a political junkie only, you’ll be disappointed by the limited amount of pages that politics per se gets.

Hedges and Sacco’s collaboration tells both a small intimate story of individuals caught up in a cycle of poverty fueled by oppression and disdain from the ruling classes, and the very big story of that oppression and exploitation.

Agree with conclusions/politics or not, the act of looking at these particular “sacrifice zones” alone forces one to think through how much injustice comes to pass, and to what degree we are to tolerate/promote the continuation of such practices/outcomes.

I’ll say that Hedges conclusions are a little further afield than I’d probably take them, and that I do not share his enthusiasm for the Occupy movement as such the profound turning point in this kind of debate as he asserts (I’d say that it’s feasible that this model may change how people across racial/economic divides organize themselves versus the powers that be but that we have to see what persists), but the kind of mixed media approach that Sacco and Hedges take makes one take a fresh look and reassess one’s own opinions and fact base.